Yearning to Breathe Free

I am thinking about Emma Lazarus. She is the American Jewish poet whose words are etched on the Statue of Liberty. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Her words remain a powerful statement of American’s promise.

Emma Lazarus was raised in privilege. She descended from America’s first Jewish settlers and belonged to New York’s fabled Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Her father owned sugar refineries and was among this country’s early Sephardic elite. He counted among his friends the Vanderbilts and Astors. She learned with private tutors and studied German and French so that she could better assimilate into cultured society.

The rise of antisemitism in the 1880’s convinced her that she needed to do more. She ventured away from her society friends and worked with Russian refugees fleeing pogroms. She volunteered with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. She struggled with how her circumstances differed so dramatically from others’ experiences, most especially her fellow Jews.

She believed that America’s foundation is built on welcome.

We are a nation of immigrants.140 years ago Emma Lazarus penned “The New Colossus” reaffirming our our country’s founding principles.

This week we celebrated July 4th. 247 years ago our nation’s founders signed the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And yet these rights are not as self-evident as our founders proclaimed. The Declaration’s signers only imagined these rights for men, and not women, for Whites, and not enslaved Blacks.

If we wish these rights to become evident for all then every generation must take up the struggle again, and again, and again. They must renew the declaration’s promise. They must recommit to making these rights more apparent and even more clear.

There are those who wish to march our nation backward rather than forward. There are those who wish to obscure the promise hidden between the Declaration of Independence’s lines.

This week our portion is named for a man who wishes to pull the Israelites backward. Pinchas is a zealot who killed his fellow Jews because they strayed from his exacting vision. The portion’s import, however, is found later. It is discovered in five women: Mahlon, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah and Tirzah. They are the daughters of Zelophahad who argue that their inheritance should be equal to a man’s.

They declare, “Give us a holding among our father’s kinsmen!” (Numbers 27)

It is not zealotry that wins the day but reason and logic. The zealot wishes to turn the clock back. The thinker looks forward. She uses reason. Where others see only white spaces between the lines, she sees opportunity for the promise to become even more fulfilled.

It may not have been imagined in their own day, but it is there. Emma Lazarus saw it. We must do so as well. She understood that our nation’s promise is not about about holding on to privilege. It is instead found in welcome.

What made Emma Lazarus walk from her storied Union Square apartment to the teeming slums of Ward’s Island? We will never know what caused her to see America’s hope not in her family’s success but instead in those immigrants’ misery. We can know this.

It began with leaving her apartment.

Let all breathe free!